The Producer

As some of my regular readers, followers, and subscribers may know, one of my abiding lifelong passions is music. It all began in 1964 when, as a ten-year-old child, I heard my very first pop record. It was 'She Loves You,' by the legendary Beatles from my home city, Liverpool.

As soon as I heard that magical fab-four sound coming out of the speaker of a Danssete record player, I was well and truly hooked. I wanted to be a Beatle, to sing and play those guitars, to create those great types of memorable songs, and to make that sort of spell-binding sound.

From that early age, I learned to play the guitar and the piano. I also started to write my own songs. That was the beginning of a life-long career that included being in a folk duo, and rock groups, as well as being a relatively successful solo, singer-songwriter with four albums of my own compositions to date.

In time I also once briefly owned my own record label (Stag Music) and even once worked at the EMI pressing plant, and Abbey Road recording studios, in London, where the Beatles recorded almost all of their chart-topping hit singles and groundbreaking albums.

In time I also performed in operetta as a tenor in The Vagabond King and Calamity Jane. And moving on from that I became a film and TV actor, although it was mostly small parts and extras work. In reality, it was the life of a musician that I wanted the most.

After my second divorce in Spain, I finally turned to music full-time. I gigged a great deal in my Spanish city. I probably played about 350 concerts a year, which is a darn sight more than many of today's so-called mega stars. I also started to spend a lot of time in one recording studio after another. And, at one point, I owned my own piano bar, called 'Yesterday' after the Paul McCarney song of that name.

At the same time, I owned and ran my own language academy, as well as being a freelance English teacher. Busy? You bet. I was a lot younger then and bounding with energy, not so much in these days of living something miscalled 'retirement.'

In time, both the language academy and the piano bar ceased to be, for a variety of complicated reasons, mostly other people's interference. And that left me at a loose end. I took up the slack by becoming a talent scout cum music producer for new young artists, who I discovered in the course of my work as a teacher and musician.

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Looking back from a distance in time and place, I have to say I have never ever met so many talented kids who, along with the help of their interfering fathers, so comprehensively screwed up the opportunity to make it big in the music business.

I had one girl, who shall remain nameless, who along with her father tried to take complete control of what was being offered. First off, the father refused to let the girl sign a contract, insisting that he would be the one to sign it! He wanted any potential money accruing from record sales to go to him rather than his daughter. I point blank refused to allow him to sign, even if it was on her behalf, as her parent and guardian. If push came to shove, she would be free to go off with another producer or record company, leaving me with a fifty-four-year-old man who could not sing to save his own life.

The next problem this man gave me was when we were making a video to go with the song. The father turned up at the shoot and demanded that we shut down for an hour whilst he told his daughter off for not going home the night before.

Then the man demanded to know the contact details of my solicitor who had drawn up the contract. After I gave him my solicitor's address, unbeknownst to me, the man went round to the solicitor's office and ordered him to change certain details in the contract, which he claimed he had discussed and agreed with me. This was a blatant lie.

After all of this nonsense, the girl took an unfinished copy of a song we had recorded, on the understanding that it was only for her to listen to. Under no circumstances was she to distribute the song, especially on social media. What did the girl and her father go and do?

They went and recorded their own homemade video, with lots of her father's amateur paintings on show in close-up. Then they posted the video and song on YouTube! All this was done without my knowledge or permission.

When the stupid girl proudly sent me an email with a link to the YouTube video, saying joyfully, "Hey Ralph, Look what we did!" I went full-out, off-the-scale, apeshit ballistic. I actually wanted to carry out a nuclear bomb attack on the girl and her pretentious jumped-up father.

Meanwhile, my co-producer, guitar virtuoso, and ex-Bon Jovi producer, Lance Quinn, was busy speaking to record company executives in the United States trying to get a deal for the girl. There was one label interested, but they wanted to hear more songs.

When I asked the girl to go back to the studio with us, she said I would have to pay her a lot of money since she was now a star in the making. I'd had enough of this nonsense and tore the contract up and told her to get lost.

I also demanded that she take down the video with our song on it and she refused claiming "It's my song now! I put a lot into singing that song. It's mine." Unbelievable. So by the girl's reckoning, if you make a video of yourself singing Candle in the Wind by Elton John, you can then claim ownership of the song and collect all royalties!

In the end, I had to threaten YouTube with a multi-million dollar lawsuit if they did not remove our song. It soon got removed, pretty darn fast as it happens. The girl reacted by throwing a hissy fit on Facebook with lots of insults and nasty lies about me. She only removed that horrible content when I threatened her with legal action and a demand for a million dollars in damages for lies and defamation of character.

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I won't bore you with the details of the other half a dozen kids I produced over a period of about three years, suffice it to say, they were not much better than the girl and her father. In fact, I did write a piece about a young Spanish lad called Carmelo. Here is the link to that story here on Vocal Media;

The Story Of My Life. Once Again Duped Out Of Due Credit. Ralph Emerson.

***

Looking back, I thoroughly enjoyed the time in the studio producing those kids with Lance, who Bon Jovi once referred to as a genius. However, the attempts at calling the shots by jumped-up wannabe nobodies were far more than I was prepared to tolerate. In fact, neither Lance nor I would take that sort of treatment from an established megastar, let alone a nobody.

There was a time when I too was a kid with stars in his eyes, and I would have sold my grandmother to be presented with such a golden opportunity as we presented to those kids. Well, maybe my grumpy paternal grandmother, not my lovely maternal one.

In the end, Lance got seriously ill and had to go back to his home in Florida in the United States, and I got pretty darn ill too, and I had to go home to Tokyo, in Japan.

Above all, it was a five-year period of my life I wouldn't change for the world, even with the downsides. But I wouldn't want to repeat it in a hurry. As for those kids, I have not got a clue what happened to them. I sometimes wonder if they ever sit back and think to themselves

"What the hell did I do? How could I have got that wonderful experience so out of shape, and manage to piss it all away in the process?" A one-in-a-million opportunity, the dream of a lifetime, flushed down the drain for a few moments of temporary insanity and my bothersome control freak father."

Oh well, all a storm in a teacup really, you live and learn, maybe, some folk do, and some folk do not.